There are pros and cons, of course, to using a stick to chalk-mark car tyres and then coming back two or three hours later to see if the car has moved away, in accordance with the 415’s infamous Residential Parking Permit Program.

Here’s what it looks like:

An actual world capital of innovation would employ GPS and license plate scanners, these days, right?

Anyway, on the pro side, this method works, sort of. What some people do to stick it to the man is to rub off the chalk marks to buy a few more hours of free parking, until the next round of SFMTA marking and checking, but that’s agin the rules – you could get in trouble for that, one supposes.

On the con side, our PCO’s are routinely Bending Over with Piece of Chalk at the End of a Stick. The reason why it costs our SFMTA an excessive amount of money to run the RPP program is because there’s no market discipline at work here, there’s no incentive for the SFMTA to save money because of how CA state law works, oh well.

Anyway, just because your Interim Mayor says that your town is the “Innovation Capital of the World” doesn’t necessarily mean that your town is actually the “Innovation Capital of the World”

Supposedly, the SFMTA doesn’t care about this issue, since it’s “revenue-neutral” for it, but IRL, the SFMTA just loves this idea. The SFMTA wants to “manage” more and more and more always always always, despite its demonstrated incompetence at performing its core function, which is moving people around.

SFMTA “work rules” make the SFMTA inefficient. (I wonder if they have a list of all these rules.) So the less efficient it becomes, the more money it gets, perversely, in annual RPP revenue. (If the SFMTA operated a McDonalds, a Big Mac would cost $20 and take a half-hour to prepare, cause you know, cost-plus pricing, and you know, “work rules.”)

Anyway, the SFMTA wants to makes things easier for certain people to keep cars on the streets of San Francisco, so that’s a big clue on how it’ll vote come March.

What it actually wants is an annual household SFMTA tax levied on everybody, but this will have to do until that time comes…

You want to see democracy in action? Simply go to all the meetings involving “Area Q” and then push and push and maybe the SFMTA will eventually throw you a bone by including or excluding your block from this or that parking scheme. It’s too late to get started now, but, you know, for next time.

Now I’m not saying it’s owned by a church, but this is what 15-passenger church vans look like (so I call them church vans) plus this ride finally got the boot just outside of a big old church parking lot.

Note the flat tire.

Note that the reason this van got the boot is due to an excessive number of unpaid tickets having to do with the Residential Parking Program, which, you know, I don’t believe in. So what’ll happen is that a meter maid will mark your car with chalk (that’s the old-school method) or somehow note its time and position with license plate scanners or something like that and then come back two hours later to issue a ticket – this can happen more than once in a day, so you can end up with more than one ticket after a day of parking in the wrong neighborhood. Anyway, this van managed to get over $150 in RPP tickets on its windshield in just one day last week.

Poor little feller:

Click to expand

In mitigation, the SFMTA could have just towed this rig and that would have been much worse for the owner.

Anyway, rules are rules I suppose.

Unless the owner performs an intervention to get it in running shape and also to pay off the SFMTA the four-figures worth of tickets and fines and boot installation and removal fees and also to deal with the DMV, this van is headed for the auction.

Of course, the richers of Alamo Squar-ah won’t be paying for parking per se, ’cause parking is free. No no, they’ll be paying to prevent other people from parking in “their” hood – that’s the way you gotta look at it. Who knows how many more Parking Control Officers the SFMTA will be able to bill to the RPP program after this.

And who knows when a simple permit sticker will cost drivers more than $200 per year. I’m thinking by the year 2020 it will be that high.

*I’m eligible to pay MUNI $104 per year for a permit but I don’t believe in the system so I don’t buy the permit. I’m sure the SFMTA would love to jack up the cost to like $1000 but they can only charge a “fee” based on expenses. I believe that the “expenses” included the pay, benefits and retirement of 15 Parking Control Officers / meter maids but I don’t know that for sure. Quite sneaky to do that, SFMTA.